My Lord Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen. First can I welcome you to this presentation. Very grateful to you for coming so early in the day. It's a presentation of what Government is doing to try to encourage and help the growth of more jobs.
What of course depends mainly upon you, because we know that more jobs come from successful business. But there is a great deal that Government can do to help you to flourish in business and that we are doing. There's also a lot Government can do to help with training. That we are doing in concert with you and we are trying to gear the training to jobs which are already available.
I must say thank you to you for the way in which you are cooperating with the youth training programme. I saw an example of it in Dagenham yesterday and was most impressed both with the training and the interest taken in young people.
There are also things which Government can do to help able and talented young people to start up on their own, because that is where new business and new jobs will come from. That, too, we are doing. It may be helping with finance through things like the Enterprise Allowance; it may be helping people to start out through other schemes; it may be helping them with design because design is extremely important. All of this is to try fundamentally to help you the entrepreneurs to get flourishing business whether in the industrial or in the service sector so that we shall create the new jobs and the new prosperity we need.
Inevitably when I come to these presentations, I am asked one question and I have already been asked it this morning: do you think, Mrs Thatcher, that we shall always have something like 2–3 million people unemployed? And my answer [end p1] must be this: had we had television or radio I should have been asked that question had I been in this position at the beginning of this century when mechanisation started to come to agriculture and when, later, mechanisation started to come to industry. The same worries, the same problems. But as we know, the scientific opportunities at first may have eliminated a few jobs but later created a massive number of jobs as people took advantage of those new developments to create new products which were not possible before and to bring greater prosperity to the mass of our people.
That I believe will happen again. I believe the process has already started as so many of the jobs we have today were jobs which did not exist some years ago because the products did not exist. What we have is the problem of managing change and in that we each have a role: you the entrepreneur who know far better than any Government or any Government Department where there is a need which your services can fill. We the Government will have to get the taxation position right, and of course we have done a great deal about that; we the Government who can help with training schemes for young people; and we the Government who can help by creating incentives for young people if they are able to start up on their own.
That is the broad basis of our programme. I hope you'll be very interested in what you're going to see. Unfortunately I will have to leave very soon after the presentation because there's quite a lot going on at No 10 Downing Street which I must attend, especially on the day when we have Cabinet meetings and Questions in the House. So will you forgive me if I slip away soon after the presentation?
Thank you for coming. I think you're in for a very rewarding, interesting and enjoyable time, and I hope that shall be able to harness anew the great energies which there are in your companies and businesses. Thank you.